Email notification

Do you also sometimes find yourself desperately checking for new emails, afraid as you are to miss anything? Well, that time is over now, with the extremely handy Mail Watcher Panel plugin! If you set it up correctly, you can get it to notify you of new messages in a nice popup balloon and gives you easy access to your email.

Of course, the first step is to add this plugin. Not that difficult: right click a panel, “Add New Item”, then in that window select “Mail Watcher”, then click “Add”.

You then get the “Edit Properties” window. In this window you can select what type of email you want to watch by clicking “Add”.

Now, that’s very cool and all, that it checks your e-mail, but we’d like to go a bit further. First, we want it to open our email when we click the Mail Watcher icon. If you use some kind of web mail, e.g. Gmail, then we can set the “Run on click” command to firefox -new-tab http://gmail.comThat will open a new tab in Firefox that will display your email. If you use an email program like Thunderbird, you can set this command to that program, e.g.: thunderbird

Now that we have that set, let’s set the coolest feature – the notification balloon! First, we will need to have libnotify-bin installed, so fire up the Synaptic Package Manager and install that. Then we can add the “Run on new messages” command: notify-send "New mail" "You have new messages in your inbox" -i xfce-newmail

Tada! Now you are all set and will be notified when you receive a new email.

First, we will need to have libnotify-bin installed, so fire up the Synaptic Package Manager and install that.

The icon is a nice tip. For one reason or another, WordPress replaces double dashed with a single one, so --icon=xfce-newmail needs to have two dashes at the beginning! Or you could just say -i xfce-newmail

I’d like to have new mails considered as read (in thunderbird) if I click on the mail notification icon. Which command (to be executed if you click on the icon) is the right one? It should be something like “thunderbird [[account that is affected]] [[command to consider new mails as read]]”.

Hi Daniel, I don’t use Thunderbird myself but I’ve done some Googling for what command line options Thunderbird takes. Unfortunately, it seems that mark all messages as read is not an option that is available, making this function pretty much impossible to use with this feature without programming.